Vibrant Food, Vibrant Life class

Vibrant Food, Vibrant Life class

by | Jan 18, 2017 | Food, Health, Plant-Based Diet

A week from today I will be teaching a free workshop through Dominican Hospital’s Prevention Education Program (PEP). The class is called Vibrant Food, Vibrant Life. I’m super excited about this opportunity! I’m thinking of all sorts of cool ideas for making it a meaningful, fun, and interactive class. If you are interested in learning about the connection between what you eat and how you feel, I encourage you to sign up!

I’m delighted that my friend Muna AlSheikh will be assisting me with the class and sharing her testimony about a transformation in her diet and health. I know her contribution will make the class richer. I will also be bringing some tasty snacks to share with the class so people will be able to Taste the Love!

Welcome to Tastes Like Love!

Welcome to Tastes Like Love!

by | Jan 10, 2017 | Food, Health, Plant-Based Diet

Vibrant Vegetables and Fruits

Welcome to the website for Tastes Like Love! I invite you to engage with the information on this site: comment on the blog posts, check out the photo galleries, sign up for your free gift, and contact us with questions and comments!

This website is another in a series of recent firsts for me: writing and publishing the first book in a series, quitting a secure job of almost 20 years to start a business, and now, creating my first website!

My intent was to hold the energy of love while putting together these pages, though I do admit that the energy of frustration took over my being from time to time! I am so grateful to the support team at Elegant Themes; they helped me through many a technical challenge!

I hope that you will find something in these web pages and posts to inspire you to eat more plants and less animal products, or to leave animals completely off your plate. Your health, the well-being of the animals, the sustainability of the planet, and the cause of human food justice will all be served by that action! Please let me know if you are interested in support. I would love to serve you in this endeavor.

 

A Time for Reflection and Action

A Time for Reflection and Action

by | Jan 1, 2017 | Food, Health, Plant-Based Diet | 1 comment

As the New Year gets underway, many people who follow the Gregorian calendar are thinking about changes we would like to set into motion. I was unaware of the statistics, but had a hunch that one of the most common New Year’s resolutions that people make is to loose weight. I imagined that other health-related changes are also potentially high-ranking resolutions. Well, I turned to the internet for answers, and guess what? A site called “Statistic Brain” has this to say about New Year’s resolution statistics:

  • The most common New Year’s resolution for 2017 is “Lose Weight / Healthier Eating!”
  • This resolution captured 21% of the responses.
  • The statistics came from a poll of 1,273 respondents. (The poll was U.S. based.)

It should come as no surprise to anyone in the U.S. who pays attention to any media that many people are concerned with their weight and their diets. I have been deeply engrossed in reading The China Study lately. This book by T. Colin Campbell, MD, and his son Thomas M. Campbell, M.D. exposes and clearly explains a huge body of decades of nutritional research, including the huge “China Study” for which the book is named. I may be an unusual bird, but I find this book to be a page turner! It’s pages contain ample support for all those people who resolved to loose weight and eat better, in the form of information from study after study that come to the same conclusion: that a whole foods, plant-based diet is the most optimal form of nutrition for humans. This diet leads to weight loss for those who are overweight or obese, and can also prevent and even reverse the chronic diseases that kill most of us in the U.S.: heart disease, circulatory system malfunctions, diabetes, cancer, etc.

The other fascinating book I just finished reading a couple of weeks ago is Proteinaholic: How Our Obsession with Meat is Killing Us, by Garth Davis, MD. Both of these books encourage readers to adopt a whole foods, plant-based diet, and provide ample convincing evidence to support this recommendation.

One of the many compelling reasons to make a switch to plants is that fully 40% of Americans will die of heart disease or other malfunctions of the heart and circulatory system! (according to a study cited in The China Study) That’s pretty shocking. Just think, four out of every ten people we know will die of diseases that can be prevented by a diet high in plant foods such as vegetables, fruits, legumes, and whole grains. Not only that, but a low-fat plant-based diet has also demonstrated that heart disease can be reversed.

Reading these books has really inspired and provoked me to do more to support people in eating healthy foods. I realized that people are dying for lack of knowing what I know. I am ready to share in a big way. What we eat can heal or harm. What we eat can restore our vitality or kill. We are at choice in every moment about what we put in our mouths. Let’s choose wisely. Let’s choose vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds: vital, life-giving foods. If you want support to get on track with your food choices, please don’t hesitate to contact me. I would love to serve you in the cause of vital health!

A Fishing Trip with Dad

A Fishing Trip with Dad

by | Nov 29, 2016 | Compassion, Ethics, Personal Stories, Specism, Spirituality

The following is an excerpt from Sensational Salads to Cool the Earth, by Beth Love.

When I was a child, maybe 10 or 11 years old, and several years before the advent of vegetarianism in my family, our father took my sister and brother and me out on a fishing expedition. If I remember correctly, he chartered a boat and we went out on the sea. Much of the experience is lost in the depths of memory, but I do clearly recall that I was the only person who caught a fish, a very large tuna. I also remember the sound of the fish after it had been hauled into the boat, disconnected from the hook, and placed into a wooden box on the deck; in fact this sound is the crispest part of the memory. For the rest of that expedition, until it finally died, the fish flopped around in the box, causing crashing, erratic, drum-like sounds. I was fixated on those sounds. They forcefully drove me to face the fact that I was the instigator of the slow, painful death of a living creature. If, as seems likely, there was blood in the box when the fish was removed, or if the body of the fish was lacerated from its heroic struggles, I have completely blocked these things out of my memory.

In recalling the incident, I want to believe that I begged and pleaded with my father to let the fish go. I can almost see my child self doing that, hear myself crying out for mercy for the fish. I even seem to have a vague recollection of my dad taking a stubborn stand; after all, he had paid good money to charter the boat for the purpose of catching fish! In actuality, however, I don’t really know if I even made the suggestion that the fish be released. I may have simply sat, silent and numb, feeling disempowered to right the wrong that I had surely just committed.

I also want to believe that I took a stand when my Baba (Dad’s mother) cooked the fish and served it to us later that day. I want to believe that I refused to eat it and that I made my reasons clear. But I don’t really know whether I ate it or not, or whether I said anything or not.

I fantasize about the idea of having had that incident be a conversion experience—of having sworn off of eating living creatures ever after. I know that that did not happen.

How is it that most of us who live in cultures in which the eating of meat is normalized become so shut off from the ethical and spiritual dimensions of routine cruelty and killing? How have we, as a species, so fully otherized our animal brothers and sisters such that we can take their bloody, dead bodies into our bodies for pleasure without even giving it a second thought? How can we tolerate the ripping of children away from their mothers in order that we might enjoy the mothers’ milk? Or the excruciatingly horrifying realities of imprisoning animals in Auschwitz-style conditions so we can take pleasure from consuming their body parts, their children, their potential children?

(The photo is of my dad, my siblings Craig and Alix, and me, taken around the time of the fishing trip. I am wearing a treasured pair of bleach-dyed bell-bottoms that my dad bought me, after much begging and pleading and protestations to his suggestion that I get a pair of JC Penney’s “plain-pockets!”)